Electro Kinetic Mining of Rare Earths

By Ian Page – 2022.12.07

Wang, G., Xu, J., Ran, L. et al. A green and efficient technology to recover rare earth elements from weathering crusts. Nat Sustain (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00989-3

This is a low-impact innovation in mining that has been demonstrated on real deposits of rare earths at the 14-ton scale.

It’s not fast but does seem to recover more from a deposit at a higher purity.

It just involves an electric charge between top and bottom (could it be sides?) of a pile of crushed ore.

A whole variety of effects occur but I think of it as electrochromatography, where all the different ions move toward the electrode but constantly interchange with the ions in the rock particles. As a result, the tiny differences between the motility of different ions is exaggerated thousands of times and the ions appear at different times at the electrode. By deciding when to take the samples, you should get highly separated REEs.

I don’t know how suitable this is for mass production, but the combination of getting more of the metals out of the ore, and with less chemistry or cost seems significant.

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